I shall speak only briefly.
I support all Members on both sides of the House who are pushing for more in this deal. As I said in an intervention earlier, Barrow contains the largest number of mesothelioma victims in the country. In most of those cases, the employer can be traced, because it was the Vickers shipyard. However, the families of the victims—wives who have seen their husbands die, children who have seen their fathers, and in some instances their mothers, experience that horrible, horrible death—are standing in solidarity with other families throughout the country, just as they have throughout the struggle for appropriate compensation that has continued for far too long.
Let us be clear about the fact that there can be no total fairness in this regard. If there were total fairness, people who went to work to do an honest job, to earn a living, to build ships and to work in industry would not have caught this disease and died in terrible ways, or
caught a disease which is a ticking time bomb and which hangs over their lives now. Do we want to see premiums go up for current payers of insurance cover? No of course we do not, but it is absolutely clear that the victims who have waited so long for compensation should not be the ones who continue to bear the financial cost and penalty of this.
4.30 pm
The Minister and his predecessors deserve some credit for taking on the consultation that the previous Government set out. As I have said before in the Chamber, my hon. Friends who were here before me pushed for this for so many years under the last Government and they should have got further faster, but that was not for want of trying by Ministers.